My fifth month teaching English in a small northern Italian city called Varese, a place no tourist has or should ever step foot, I took up the habit of describing the “state of my soul” at the top of my diary entries. That January my soul was: a walrus, a decaffeinated tea bag in cold water, permafrosted tundra (my sex life the permafrost), a used tissue at the bottom of a backpack, rotting.

Off and on for the better part of two decades, I was casual friends with a guy named Mark. Rumor had it that he had walked in on his father right at the moment his father decided to take his own life via shotgun.

Mark was a few years older than I was, and was part of the tail end of the first wave of Phoenix punk rockers. He had been in a marginally important band that had a record out on Placebo Records, the label that was home to Jodie Foster’s Army and Sun City Girls.

I started following baseball in 1987, at the age of seven, which means the first World Series I watched was between the Twins and the Cardinals. The previous Series, of course, was won by the Mets, the team I soon came to root for, hanging posters of Darryl Strawberry and Howard Johnson on my bedroom wall. I’ve continued to follow the Mets throughout the years, but three decades later, although they’ve twice returned to the Series, they have not been able to close it out, to achieve what they did the very year before I started following them.

My counselor once told me that my tumor, the tiny tumor on my pituitary, was not me. Actually, what she said was, “You are not your tumor, Martha.” She was right, I am not my tumor. But she was also wrong, because the tumor is most certainly me. I decided in that moment that I didn’t like her.

That particular therapist is now long gone from my life, but I still have my tumor. It’s still there now, somewhere on my pituitary gland, causing problems. Surgeons tried to remove it twice and failed both times.

If you were to ask my husband about my sleep habits, he would tell you how I kick and punch, how I speak in tongues — how I even try to shove him out of our double bed. “You slept like a total maniac last night,” he’ll say nearly every weekend, coffee mug in hand, as he tries to hide his smile. I usually protest, though I know it happens far too often to be mere hyperbole.

To be “a Pollyanna” is a complicated thing. According to Merriam-Webster, a Pollyanna is “a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything.” The original Pollyanna, the protagonist in Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel of that name, suffers endless bad luck but copes by playing “the glad game,” which consists of finding reasons to be happy about anything and everything. Pollyanna’s father teaches her the game one Christmas when Pollyanna, who is hoping for a doll, instead receives a pair of crutches from the missionary barrel. Through the game, Pollyanna decides that she is glad re: the crutches because she doesn’t need to use them. The Pollyannas and Pollyanna-ish of the world are the same way: They manage to be happy or at least optimistic about situations that others would deplore.

When I was 22 years old, I fell in love with an older woman. J was from out of town, a poet and a musician wearing leather pants and a dog collar at the club in San Francisco where I’d gone to dance. Her friend was dating my friend, and we tagged along with them to a late-night diner not far from my apartment, talking about books while they made out like teenagers. I had no idea what I was doing that night when I took her back to my place—that this would be love and not a fling, that she was much older than me, that there was a meaningful difference between 37 and 22. All I knew was something, finally, was happening to me.